Field
This disclosure is generally related to distribution of digital content. More specifically, this disclosure is related to a method and system for facilitating random access to a piece of content in a content centric network.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to create a vast amount of digital content. Content-centric network (CCN) architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing and processing such digital content. A CCN includes entities, or nodes, such as network clients, forwarders (e.g., routers), and content producers, which communicate with each other by sending interest packets for various content items and receiving content object packets in return. CCN interests and content objects are identified by their unique names, which are typically hierarchically structured variable length identifiers (HSVLI). An HSVLI can include contiguous name components ordered from a most general level to a most specific level.
A content producer may serve as a proxy between data sources (e.g., other content producers) and content consumers. For example, a consumer may send to the producer an interest request to perform a function based on data collected by the producer. The producer may obtain the data from the data sources, perform or compute the requested function, and return the result of the function to the consumer in the form of a content object. However, the rate at which the producer is able to obtain or receive updated data from the data sources may cause the producer to re-compute the function each time it receives a request from a consumer. If the computation is expensive, the producer may become overwhelmed with requests from multiple consumers, which can result in congestion and network inefficiency.
While a CCN brings many desired features to a network, some issues remain unsolved for a producer in handling multiple consumer requests that require computationally expensive operations and that are based on data from multiple data sources.